The Virtue of Canon Events

How unfortunate events can shape your future and warrant your success.

A note: I got inspired to write this after reading the Guardian’s article “’A form of Acceptence’: TikTok’s new trend of ‘canon events’” and after experiencing a canon event myself.

As the Guardian puts it: “The idea of canon events is central to the newly released animated movie, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, in which all the incarnations of Spiderman from parallel dimensions are bound together by several key (canon) events that must occur in each.

They are unavoidable. And attempts to prevent them from happening — for example, not getting bitten by a radioactive spider or tragically losing a parental figure — could lead to the very fabric of time and space unraveling.”

So essentially, canon events are unfortunate periods of your life that make you who you are now.

Bad things happen, minor and major. They suck, I know. They are terrible. If I had the power to stop all miseries in the world, I would’ve done that; indefinitely. But I, and you, don’t have such faculties. So annihilating unfortunate incidents is out of the equation.

A lot of bad things had happened to me, many tough situations I’d confronted, and a myriad of bad hours, days, and weeks I’d spent in my living. At first, you are overwhelmed by a complex of feelings, emotions, and physical reactions: anger, irritation, sadness, mourning, regret, disappointment, hopelessness, stress, sweating, feeling out of breath, over-pumping heart, detachment, and go on.

These feelings don’t always lead to bad places, though. When you are feeling defeated by a bad happening, it’s pensively stimulating. It makes you doubt your abilities; makes you question where you’re standing; makes you resent the ones who have let you down, who have thought of you as less and incapable. It disappoints you for a while. But also, when you are beaten down by hardship, doubt, and devastation, you get propelled by a force, inside; you are enraged by your pent-up emotions. It provides you with the opportunity to doubt. Then, you ask what I’m going to do next. How I’m going to live? Would I give up? Would I keep going?

I think this sense of defeat and rage invigorates your more-than-capable nervous system. It’s as if it starts the engine of your brain. Initially, you may not know what to do and what is the next step. Because you are mourning. But after a while, which is not so long, you get a sense of clarity. You can focus better than ever; because it’s like you are closing a chapter of your life and starting a new one. Out of nowhere, there comes a motivation making you want to do something, something special. The aftermath of defeat is unique. Not always do you encounter a nexus of emotions. The sense of defeat exerts an electrifying impulse, so strong activating some previously-off areas of your clever mind. Facing these emotions makes us more creative, and creativity comes out of strong emotions.

So I’d say we must take advantage of the force gifted by unfortunate happenings in our life because that pile of pent-up energy doesn’t come out often when you are calm and peaceful.

Now let me tell you some of my experiences with defeat and disappointment and the impacts they had:

• The minor canon event: The most recent one was when I uploaded my translation work- I sometimes work as a barrier breaker- on a freelance website, and the inspector assessing the projects to see if the translator was half-assing the work was unsatisfied with the results. Speaking frankly, they were right; I didn’t carefully translate the material. I had to go somewhere, and I just wanted to end it as soon as possible, then come back and work more on the text, then upload a better, more refined version. But to my back luck, the client saw it so fast- it rarely happens- and the inspector assessed it faster. So, they said you have two options: One, correct the deficits and upload again- since I was in a place where I couldn’t do the work, it was out of consideration- two, we transfer the project to someone else. So it became another translator’s responsibility to do the job. Since I almost always provide quality work and do my research, I wasn’t so much grumbled at, and they ignored my error. But it wasn’t enough to stop me from sensing a mixture of resentment, disappointment, doubt, and worry. It only grew bigger and bigger, to the point that blush was all over my face, and sweat secretion to its peak. It wasn’t as much of a big deal, but since I’m a very sensitive guy and consider myself a hard-working translator, and recently caring so much about productivity and being better than before (it’s intoxicating for your body and mind to assume you are worthy only if you are productive all the time, so chilling out sometimes is a good decision), receiving a complaint was a heavy burden. So I was grieving like that for maybe 2 or 3 hours that, suddenly, something changed. That feeling of disappointment and resentment gave way to more ideas and creativity. It was as if I was thought of as incapable, so my resentment ignited this strong feeling of doing something fantastic, noble, and brave. It was as if this experience gave way to more creativity and ideas. Those intensifying emotions lightened my nerves, electrified my synapses, and gave me the motivation, strength, and bravery of doing something, whatever it is, how big or small it is: just doing it. And then I wrote this article.

• The major canon event: The second one is a much bigger canon event. It’s about my weight. When growing up, I was a skinny boy. But I changed quite a bit toward entering my teenage years. I got obese, fat tissue all over my body. At first, it wasn’t as much of a deal; I was still a kid and didn’t really think about my appearance. I just enjoyed the food. But when you get older, you take more care of the way you look. You become sexually more active and try to find dates, and in finding dates, looking fit is an advantage, especially for someone like me who didn’t have much self-esteem and was self-conscious about my looks. So after experiencing the effects of low confidence, sadness, and not feeling right in my body, I tried to lose weight, and I was damn successful- not only I lost a significant amount of fat, but I also gained quite a lot of muscles. My fitness journey is a prolonged story filled with ups and downs, improvements, disappointments, drawbacks, and OCD, so I can’t explain everything here. But I can tell you that it was quite the journey and one of the biggest changes in my livelihood. I would’ve never been that passionate and determined about fitness if I wasn’t obese and uncomfortable with my body in the first place. The consequences of obesity and low self-esteem encouraged me to fundamentally change myself and keep my fitness hopefully forever.

So this is to remind you that unfortunate events are inevitable but have the power to touch off sensations that have never been accessed and open the path to creativity, improvement, and novelty. So try to navigate them in the right direction and unlock that unimaginable potency with your unique emotions.